Emanuel to light menorah at Daley Plaza during Hanukkah

Nuccio DiNuzzo/Chicago Tribune

Mayor Rahm Emanuel making brief remarks at the Illinois Venture Capital Association's 11th Annual Awards Dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel Recently. He will be lighting a menorah at the Daley Center during Hanukkah.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel making brief remarks at the Illinois Venture Capital Association's 11th Annual Awards Dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel Recently. He will be lighting a menorah at the Daley Center during Hanukkah. (Nuccio DiNuzzo/Chicago Tribune)

After flipping the switch for two annual tree-lighting ceremonies in Daley Plaza, Chicago's first Jewish mayor Rahm Emanuel will light the menorah on the third night of Hanukkah Monday, according to the rabbi in charge of the celebration.

“It’s more personal,” said Rabbi Meir Chai Benhiyoun, leader of Lubavitch Chabad of the Loop. “It’s not business. It’s not politics. He wants to do it.”

The eight-day festival of lights, which begins at sundown on Saturday this year, commemorates the ancient miracle of how a day's worth of oil burned for eight days in the newly liberated temple of Jerusalem.

Benhiyoun said although kindling the flames normally involves lighting a wick soaked in oil or wax candles, flipping the switch on an electric menorah also fulfills “an integral part of the mitzvah of the menorah -- publicizing the miracle.”

Thirty feet tall and 18 feet wide, Chicago’s candelabra required two cranes and a trailer to install earlier this week. Designed by the late Alfred Von Samek, it is a replica of the White House menorah that illuminates the South Lawn of the presidential residence.

Benhiyoun actually met Emanuel at the lighting of the White House menorah several years ago when Emanuel served as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff. After Emanuel’s family was out of town during his first Hanukkah as mayor, he promised to light the menorah this year, Benhiyoun said.

The city has issued permits this year for a variety of holiday displays in Daley Plaza -- both secular and religious, including a Santa house, a Nativity scene and a menorah.

Emily Soloff, associate director for interreligious and intergroup relations for the American Jewish Committee, applauded the mayor’s decision to light up the plaza more than once.

“How wonderful and reflective of the diversity of the city that the mayor can both honor the Christian holiday and the Jewish holiday as well,” she said. “The rabbinic view of the menorah is that it professes the miracle of the oil. Hanukkah’s proximity to Christmas in America has lifted up the notion of religious freedom, that Hanukkah is a holiday that commemorates the mriacle of religious freedom.”